About

Our goal

Our Lab develops innovative ways to model the social structure and spatial patterns of trade and violent networks in Africa. Our goal is to spatialize social networks over time by bringing together three approaches that have been developed separately: spatial analysis, network analysis, and temporal analysis.

Our Lab deals, not with the random trivia of the day, but with the fundamental underlying structures of trade and conflict. We do not merely observe and collect data; we develop theories that help us understand how trade evolve and how conflicts emerge and spread. We then test our models against reality, using the most accurate geographic data available.

Our history

Our Lab build on numerous research and policy projects funded, since the early 2010s, by the OECD, NASA, NSF, the United Nations World Food Program, the U.S. Department of State, and the governments of Denmark and Luxembourg.

In 2015, our study of cross-border trade networks pioneered the introduction of social network analysis to the study of borderlands in West Africa. Since then, our team has contributed to map and model the impact of gender, religion, income, borders, cities and ethnicity on trade and violent networks.

This deductive approach has led us to introduce the Spatial Conflict Dynamics indicator (SCDi) in 2020, which measures the intensity and distribution of violence. In 2025, we invented the concept of spatial life cycle of conflicts, a unique theoretical framework that combines space, time, and social networks. In 2026, we introduced sequence analysis into conflict studies.

Contact

Follow us on LinkedIn, contact us by email, or visit us in 3131 Turlington Hall, Department of Geography, University of Florida, Gainesville FL 32611, United States. We post our data on this GitHub account.

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